Michel Serres: The Natural Contract

The new counterpart of these new plates of humanity is global nature, Planet Earth in its totality, the seat of reciprocal and crossed interrelations among its local elements and its giant components-oceans, deserts, atmospheres, or stocks of ice. The human plates themselves are the seats of reciprocal and crossed interrelations among individuals and subgroups, their tools, their world-objects, and their knowledge, assemblages that little by little are losing their relations with place, locality, neighborhood, proximity. Being-there is getting rarer.

This is the state, the balanced account, of our relations with the world, at the beginning of a time when the old social contract ought to be joined by a natural contract. In a situation of objective violence, there is no way out but to sign it.
At the very least, war; ideally, peace.